"Two Sphinxes" on the Dream Stele at Giza? (Just looking at the pictures)

The Dream Stele is a rectangular monument carved from granite, standing about 3.6 metres high and weighing roughly 15 tons. It was erected around 1401 BC (a thousand years or so after the Spinx itselff was carved) to commemorate a divine dream. It originally served as the rear wall of a small open-air chapel constructed in the 18th dynasty by Thutmose IV between the paws of the Sphinx as part of the New Kingdom revitalisation of the Giza site in the New Kingdom (esp. Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV). Evidence suggests that the monument was repurposed from an earlier structure: it appears to be a reused door lintel from the entrance to Khafre’s mortuary temple (the pivot sockets on its reverse correspond to those found at the temple’s threshold), which is important evidence that the temple was already in ruins by the time it was erected.

The stele was rediscovered in 1818 during excavations carried out by Giovanni Battista Caviglia as part of efforts to clear the sand from around the Sphinx. Initially the inscription was intact, but after the stone had been covered by sand again and re-excavated in 1925, the surface of the stone after rapid heating and drying in its newly exposed (and damp) state, flaked off. Probably it had been weakened by wicking of saline groundwater into the lower end of the stone and the crystallisation of salts within micro-cracks (caused by the pounding technique used to shape it).

On the preserved upper part, the lunette contains a depiction of Thutmose IV (cartouches visible) on both the left and right sides presenting offerings and libations to the Sphinx. The Sphinx itself is shown elevated on a high pedestal, in the form of the facade of a temple or shrine, with a door represented at its base (This feature has encouraged speculation that a hidden chamber or passageway might exist beneath the Sphinx).

Top of the Dream Stele, note spalling of granite

The inscription of the offering scene on the left is:

The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Lord of the Two Lands, Menkheperure Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, bestowed with life. Greeting (the god Reharakte) with a Nemset vase (spoken by the Sphinx) “I give strength to the Lord of the Two Lands, Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances”.

In the middle

(spoken by the Sphinx) “I make (it so) that Menkheperure appears on the throne of Geb, and Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, in the position of Atum“.

On the right

The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the lord of the Two Lands, Menkheperure Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, bestowed with life. Making an offering of incense and a libation. Horemakhet (says) “I give strength to the Lord of the Two Lands, Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances”.

In the actual text is given the reason why Thutmose IV was so keen on legitimating himself in relation to this decrepit old complex next to the infilled Valley Temple of Khafre. He's riding across the desert with his mates and then turns back towards the river (to get a boat ride home?):

[...] Then the hour came to give rest to his followers, at the limbs of Horem-akhet [Horus in the Horizon, the name of the Sphinx], beside Sokar in Ra-Setjaw [gateway to the Underworld at Giza], Renutet in Northern Djeme, Mut the mistress of the Northern Wall and the mistress of the Southern Wall, Sekhmet who presides over her Kha, Set, the son of Heka, the Holy Place of the First Time [Zep Tepi] (of creation), near the Lords or Kheraha, the divine road of the gods towards the West of Iunu (Heliopolis). Now then, the great statue of Khepri was lying in this place, great of power and powerful of majesty, the shadow of Re resting upon it. The estates of Hwt-Ka-Ptah (the temple of Ptah – Memphis) and all the neighbouring cities come to it, their arms raised in adoration before him, carrying many offerings for his Ka.

In this text, it seems that the Sphinx is identified as a divine manifestation of the sun god in his various forms, including Horemakhet-Khepri-Re-Atum. In this passage it is centred in a mystic quadrangle of sites from the Temple of Ptah at Memphis, the Gateway to the Underworld at Giza, opposite Kheraha [believed to be at 'Babylon' in Fustat] - the divine road of the gods to the sacred site at Heliopolis on an island in the opening to the eastern Delta.

All this however is the preamble to the principle point.

A number of pseudoarchaeologists (wannabe egyptologists) have proposed that the PICTURE above on the stele "looks like" (ahem) a pointer to there once having been TWO sphinxes at Giza. There they are, they say, two of them. Obvious.

Basically you'll not get far in Egyptology without a knowledge of the glyphs. I don't read them myself - but at a glance even a non-adept can see a very obvious (one would have thought) feature of the inscriptions in the lunette. One reads right to left, the other left to right [you can tell by the way the signs face!]* They cannot be a depiction of a single scene, the two halves of the picture represent two aspects of the same royal action. Duh.

Double duh, because the rest of the inscription is totally clear that there was only one Horem-akhet, one great statue of Khepri to which pilgrimages came. Tuthmose became pharoah by restoring just the one, no mention of a second one.

The "picture" is misleading the glyph-illiterate pseudo archaeologists. Its not a good idea to "read" a text by only looking at the pictures.

* With my antiquities-market-watching hat on, you'd be surprised by the number of fakers [and by the same token, collectors] who've not worked out how to tell which way the signs are facing and thus cannot detect texts erroneously compiled with them going in both directions in the same pseudo-passage, which is a dead giveaway (like the use of non-existent signs).

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The Under-Pyramid Scans Scam Gets Bigger: Attention-seeking Italian Prof Makes New Claim (without checking the context)

Dr. Philippo Biondi has announced on an over-long episode of the Matt Beall podcast (shorter bit here also) that instead of publishing the full methodology and results of his work on the alleged shafts and othersuch nonsense under the Khafre pyramid, he is now messing about looking elsewhere. He says he is "almost certain he has found a second SPHINX beneath the Giza Plateau" and talks about it at some length. He's done some dubious carto-geographical jiggery-pokery to find a location - right under a "small mountain that we arrre obserjving" sticking up beyond the Western Cemetery attached to the Great Pyramid.

And then he produces some SAR scam-scans to show there are voids in it shafts coming down from the top - "just like the Sphinx" (if you believe Edward Caycee). And the plot he shows have the same pixellated rainbow splodges on it that the others havce before they are AI-manipulated to make the images that excite his slackjaw supporters.

Jason Colovito has written about where the idea came from ('Filippo Biondi Claims to Have Found Second Sphinx Under Giza', 3/26/2026). As he says, Biondi is obviously drawing on "alternative archaeology" books to make his claims. The claim is not ancient, it's from 1997. Their source appears to be tour guide Bassam el-Shammaa, whose 1997 book Egypt: Future of the Past claimed that a second sphinx stood on the Giza Plateau. I do not have this book, and Colovito neglects to say whether the tour-guide pinpointed where the "second sphinx" should be looked for. 

I will leave afficionados of whackery the pleasure of working out towards which sites this and the other side of the Atlantic this postulated monument is looking towards (but it ain't the "constellation Leo").

I'd just urge first though looking(as all archaeologists do) at the CONTEXT and the actual evidence on the site, but also seeing what we have on the ground now is part of a dynamic system, which includes taking into account the work of others. If we take a look at the satellite photos (nota bene, Mr Biondi's measurements were taken from satellite data too) we see this "small mountain we are keeping under observation" has a very characteristic shape. It has the shape of an excavation dump, most likely made from tipping the excavated material from wagons running on rails, which is why it is long, parallel0-sides and rises up in that characteristic way. There are other ones south of it. Mr Biondi, PUBLISH the Khafre shaft data, stop chasing chimeras, stop spouting off your attention-seeking, narcissistic, spurious-sensationalist stories without first THOROUGHLY checking them. This is pathetic. 

Useful Online Text

David S. Anderson, 'Understanding Ancient Mysteries: Archaeology, Pseudoarchaeology, and the Importance of Archaeological Heritage'. It is not clear to me whether this is a standalone internet document or the reproduction of a chapter from a collective work. But it is a useful explanation.

Monte Alban, Chile Redated? So, In this case Pre-Clovis Sceptics Maybe had a Point?

An early dating of the site at Monte Verde in southern Chile took a bit of time to be accepted, as the evidence found in excavations 1979-onwards was seen as ambiguous for so long. In particular, the items that were presented by the excavator Tom Dillehay as artefacts made by human hands were not accepted as such by everyboidy who saw them, they were rather difficult to unequivocally diagnose. In the end, in the 1990s, the excavator managed to persuade critical colleagues that there was early occupation of this site that was evidence for an Ice Age pre-Clovis human presence in this part of the Americas, dated at roughly 14,500 years old.

New research is however shaking the foundations of this dating. It now looks as if a recent geoarchaeological study has produced data once again challenging these conclusions 

A study [...] in Science (which has a related Perspective) aims to shatter that bedrock. It suggests the stratigraphic layers at Monte Verde are scrambled, with older wood and other organic material mixed into younger sediments, resulting in misleading radiocarbon dates. The site is just 8200 to 4200 years old, the study concludes. 

That means the site might actually date to the Holocene.  That actually would tie in better with the typology of the stone tools found on (other parts of) the original site. The new study was led by Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming working with Claudio Latorre, a paleoecologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, whose team found when the examined the evidence from their fieldwork carried out in 2023 that:

" Flooding has since destroyed the site of the original excavation near Chinchihuapi Creek, so Surovell and Latorre’s team examined several places along the creek’s banks where they could see layers of sediments that had been deposited over the course of the landscape’s history. They took samples of wood and other organic material for radiocarbon dating, as well as minerals that can be tested to determine when they were last exposed to sunlight. They concluded that 14,500 years ago, the area was a forest. Later, sediment from a wetland settled over the wood and other debris from the forest floor, followed by volcanic ash from an eruption 11,000 years ago. Then, Chinchihuapi Creek formed, cutting into the landscape and carrying some of the older wood and other organic material into the river channel. Some 8600 years ago, gravel and sand started to fill in part of the creek, sealing the 14,500-year-old organic material inside much younger sediments. The original Monte Verde dates, obtained from that older organic material “are actually good,” Latorre says. "

The results of the 2023 work are already being questioned, and it is unfortunate that the original site was no longer available for excamination and establishing the continuity of contexts across the whole investigated area. 

What is interesting in this particular context of this blog is that the so-called "Clovis-First" debate (a local spat in just a narrow field of the archaology of a distant country the other side of an ocean) is represented as typical of the allegedly dogmatic behaviour of archaeologists worldwide. The casus of the alleged mistreatment of Tom Dillehay is displayed as "what happens to ANY archaeologist who dares to put forward a new idea" in the discipline.  Let us see what happens to this staple of the Pseudo-archaeologists' mantra-narrative as the discussion over Dillehay's site progresses. 

References
University of Wyoming (edited by Sadie Harley), ' Monte Verde fieldwork resets age of famous South American archaeological site' March 19, 2026.

Lizzie Wade, 'Debate explodes over age of key South American archaeological site ' Science 19 Mar 2026.

John Bartlett, 'Archaeological site in Chile upends theory of how humans populated the Americas … again' Guardian Thu 19 Mar 2026.

video interview:  David Ian Howe 'The Peopling of the Americas never made sense until now'. YouTube Mar 19, 2026 (the story of how the project came about is really interesting and thought-provoking and will ring a bell with anyone who's ever worked on sites on floodplains of braided river sediments: here onwards - but you might want to see the 'seaweed' bit before it too). 

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Magic Used in Pyramid Construction?

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Ancient Amazonian Sites in Jeopardy

In the southwestern Amazon, one archeologist is fighting to protect ancient sites from Brazil’s seemingly unstoppable agribusiness industry, now worth $524 billion. The carvings are proof of an ancient and sophisticated civilization that aligned its agricultural calendar with summer and winter solstices. Farmers view the land as a cash cow, and the area’s historic geometric earthworks are in the way.

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Posted on YouTube by Bloomberg Originals Sep 25, 2024

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Why Pseudoarchaeology Isn’t “Just Another View”

A British trainspotter calling himself "Sir Nigel Gresley" (@JLBKL) [a name pinched from railway history] joins the discussion about the relationship between pseudoarchaeology and professional archaeologists and urges archaeologists to treat pseudoarchaeologists better. In doing so he claims that arcaheologists allegedly forget that "evidence is interpreted and an opinion is formed which is fine but the opinion is not fact".

Treating the two manners of approaching the evidence for the past as equivalents however somewhat glosses over a crucial distinction.

Properly conducted academic archaeology is not merely one "opinion" among equals but a rigorous, evidence-based discipline that demands systematic data collection, contextual analysis, peer review, falsifiability, and the integration of vast bodies of reinforcing evidence rather than isolated anomalies.

In contrast, amateur pseudo-archaeology frequently begins with preconceived conclusions--often sensational ones-—and then cherry-picks superficial similarities ("it looks like"), ignores contradictory data, bypasses contextual scrutiny, and sidesteps the methodological safeguards that prevent confirmation bias from turning speculation into purported fact.

The difference is not just stylistic or temperamental; genuine archaeology builds cumulative, testable knowledge through disciplined inquiry, whereas pseudo-archaeology often misrepresents the record to fit a narrative, which can mislead the public and undermine efforts to uncover what actually happened. Civility is essential, but so is intellectual honesty about what constitutes reliable method versus wishful interpretation.



Gresley @JLBKL added (Mar 19 2026 10:47 AM):

[...] The situation to me is very clear. We fund universities and they fund Archaeology. Graham Hancock points to an earlier civilisation about which we know very little. An archaeologist (whose name I did not make a note of) said that he is working of what he thinks was (sic). A message and a warning which is why it was deliberately buried 12,000 years ago.

So I say IF he is right AND they knew then how to predict a global catastrophe THEN I would like that to be researched more thoroughly and funded properly.

The other proposition of simply looking for evidence that looks to confirm the established paradigm has no real importance compared to finding out something that may save lives.

So let's cut out the abuse and simply concentrate on diverting the funds, both public and private, away from the current focus and onto much more useful research.

The argument presented rests on redirecting public and private funds away from “the established paradigm” in archaeology toward investigating Graham Hancock’s hypothesis of an advanced civilisation ~12,000 years ago, destroyed by a global catastrophe, whose builders allegedly left a deliberate “message and warning” at sites such as Göbekli Tepe. This is said to be more important than current research because it “may save lives”.


this proposition ignores that after several decades of Hancock raising this issue, there is in fact stiil no credible evidence for his alleged lost Allerød Antecedent Advanced Civilisation or its apocalyptic end (nor the Spanning [Seven Sages] Civilization that would be needed to transfer its knowledge to later cultures around seven millennia later). Decades of global fieldwork, seabed mapping, ice-core records, and genetic studies have found no trace of the metallurgy, writing systems, monumental architecture, or agricultural products, let alone surpluses, that an advanced global society would leave.

The Tas Tepeler sites in SE Anatolia (such as Göbekli Tepe, maybe c. 9600–8200 BCE) built by pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers are remarkable, but show continuity with later Neolithic developments, not a technological leap from a vanished supercivilisation. Disasters preserve rather than erase evidence (Pompeii, the Storegga Slide, Laacher See). The absence of any signature of Hancock’s civilisation is not explained by “it all washed away”; it is explained by the civilisation never having existed. Hancock’s thesis, popularised in best-selling books and a Netflix series, functions as entertainment that profits from speculation while dismissing the peer-reviewed record. That is why professional archaeologists describe it as pseudoscience.

The “message and a warning” supposedly buried deliberately 12,000 years ago for future generations has no basis in the archaeological literature. At one stage it was claimed that one site, Göbekli Tepe, was intentionally backfilled, but even then the lead excavator, Klaus Schmidt, stated the reason remained unknown and probably marked the ritual closure of a part of a site of a “very strange culture”. Any infilling could have been practical or ceremonial, not prophetic. The “warning to us” narrative circulates only on YouTube, Facebook, and alternative-history forums; no peer-reviewed paper attributes the backfill to a deliberate time-capsule for 21st-century humanity. Past ritual cannot be turned into future prophecy without evidence.

The trainspotter ignores the fact that there is zero firm evidence that these ancients actually “knew how to predict a global catastrophe” - like a comet strike, a volcano or whatever. No ancient society left records of scientific forecasting of ice-age endings, sea-level rise, or cosmic impacts using instruments or mathematics beyond what the archaeological record shows. Prediction requires repeatable, testable methods; myths record, they do not forecast with the precision needed to “save lives” today.

Also I find frustrating the repeated surfacing of the Hancock-originating stereotype based on a few examples of anecdote that all all archaeology worldwide merely works only to confirm an “established paradigm” and therefore has “no real importance”. Funding is awarded competitively on the basis of testable hypotheses, not dogma. The notion that the entire global discipline (from Chinese state archaeology to university digs in Peru) is a closed shop ignoring big questions is a rhetorical device, not a description of practice.

Sustained misrepresentation of this type does explain professional frustration with pseudoarchaeologists. When commentators who have conducted no fieldwork, read no primary literature or excavation reports, have a totally inadequate grasp of the cut-and-thrust of moder theory and methodology, people who have engaged only with the cheap and loaded rhetoric of commercial books accuse an entire discipline of conspiracy or laziness, the response is predictable. Archaeologists spend years in trenches, labs, and peer review; they publish open data and debate fiercely among themselves. To be told their life’s work is worthless “paradigm confirmation” while a Netflix theory is elevated as urgent public safety research feels like deliberate abuse. That does justify pushback when basic facts are ignored.

Research priorities are not decided by popular YouTube votes or personal hunches; public money requires evidence, falsifiability, and expert evaluation. Diverting funds to untestable “IF he is right” scenarios would violate the very principles that produced reliable knowledge about sites like Göbekli Tepe in the first place. Real threats such as climate change, pandemics, industrial pollution are already researched with rigorous methods, public warnings are issued by academics, reports are published, evidence displayed transparently, and then politicians for decades ignore and deny the validity of these warnings. Every time. We may get a ban on the use of a particular type of plastic bag or drinking straws, or the shape of plastic bottle tops is chaged, but in general the scientists can say what they say until they are blue in the face but we march on into self-destruction.

In short, the proposal fails on every factual count: funding continues, no lost civilisation exists, the quest for truth is best served by evidence, not by rebranding book-selling speculation as life-saving research.

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